SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—To understand how to make addressable television advertising easier to execute, one needs to first agree on the definition of what exactly “addressable” is, according to DISH Media’s Kevin Arrix. His explanation led to a broader discussion of addressable and third-party measurement during a fireside chat with consultant Howard Shimmel during Beet Retreat 2018.
“We view it as a deterministic match between two first-party data sets,” Arrix, who is SVP of DISH Media, said of the addressable designation.
“I think that is really important because there’s a lot of faux addressable out in the marketplace that is disguised as data-driven linear, and I think it’s really important for the marketplace to understand what is true addressable and what is not.”
For their part, DISH and sister entity Sling TV aren’t looking to “create automated tools or platforms per se” but rather see things from a predominantly supply side partner point of view, according to Arrix.
“One thing that we’re trying to do to make it easier for the market is combine our full addressable footprint of DISH with Sling,” Arrix said. “We’re not trying to break it apart and say this is linear addressable and this is OTT addressable.”
One year ago this month, DISH partnered with Comscore to launch a cross platform/screen solution encompassing inventory on both DISH and Sling.
Shimmel, formerly of Turner Broadcasting and now President of Janus Strategy and Insights, assumed that over time Sling will become more of the companies’ distribution footprint than DISH “due to natural things going on with consumers. Is that a good thing for your ad capabilities?”
Arrix drew distinction between DISH trying to maintain its pay-TV subscriber base and ongoing set-top box migration, since about 70% of DISH’s boxes are addressable. “While the overall DISH subscriber base, TBD what happens there, the addressable footprint of DISH will continue to grow,” said Arrix.
Asked about Comscore’s role, Arrix said the company provides third-party measurement of addressable impressions that are unified in a single report. “It’s not this set of impressions because they’re coming from a set-top box is measured this way and this set of impressions I measured this way. They’re connected in with the technology that’s actually driving addressable on our side, which is Invidi, and they’re able to deliver one pool of addressable impressions.”
As for third-party measurement in general, Arrix said, “We advocate for and partner with any third-party measurement company and we believe that it really is up to the demand side, marketers and agencies, to determine which measurement they want to go with.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
